Wrangler Brutes

Zulu

Kill Rock Stars

Having formed from the remnants of Born Against, Men’s Recovery Project and Nazti Skinz, Wrangler Brutes sold over 1,000 copies of their cassette-only album before hooking up with Kill Rock Stars to record their label debut, Zulu, with Steve Albini.

The music is an assault of speed and distortion, and the words are the result of politics and humor not just colliding but exploding. “$45” is a song about the rising cost of gas, a concept everyone driving a vehicle in these “war years” can certainly bang their head to: “$2 a gallon now, $4 a gallon now, $6 a gallon now, $8 a gallon now, $10 a gallon now, at what point do people start having fist fights over this?” The words are screamed by Sam McPheeters as a cyclone of thoughts running in circles around the ever-escalating music.

Each song on this 20 minute masterpiece is its own bit of perfection. Quick bursts of energy and anger like “Chaos Collides” (with its catchy chorus of “What the fuck!”) and “Shank’d” (an intelligent anti-establishment song) clock in at just over a minute, and many of the songs are even shorter than that. The album is thrash/hardcore as it should be, worthy of comparisons to Black Flag and Dead Kennedys.

So what does the band do after releasing one of best hardcore albums in years? They break up. Their lifespan, like their music, was short but intense.

Guitar-god Slash has officially left his Guns N’ Roses days behind, concentrating full time on his one-time side project, the Snakepit. Gail Worley speaks with Slash and vocalist Rod Jackson about the dissolusion of the Gunners and the future of the Snakepit.